Zanardi in Elba

After a disastrous campaign in Europe, CART's one-time ruler plots a return from self-imposed exile to reclaim his racing throne.

March 2001
By
JERRY GARRETT

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Alex Zanardi lives in Monaco, in a tres chic condo a few feet from the azure waters of the Mediterranean Sea. He and his wife, Daniela, shuttle their much-adored son, Niccolo, two and a half, to and from preschool. They entertain friends who drive the four hours from Zanardi's hometown of Bologna, Italy. They watch movies and read books.

Napoleon had his Elba; Zanardi has his.

"Yes, I am here," Zanardi nods, "basically doing nothing."

Zanardi sat out of racing all last year -- content to coo to his baby boy, to pedal his bicycle up and down Monte Carlo's steep hillsides, to make roostertails along the Cote d'Azur in his 58-foot powerboat (revealingly named Hakuna Matata, which means "no worries for the rest of your days"), and to feign interest in his sparsely furnished office here. It's no secret that Zanardi has established a residence here to avoid onerous Italian income taxes on his eight-figure gains from a lucrative but ill-fated 1999 season in Formula 1. But this sunny, tax-free Shangri-La has also been a place to lick his wounds and recover psychologically from a very public career meltdown.

Zanardi's F1 experience had been so painful that for a while it appeared he would not race again. He turned down offers to return to CART from owners Carl Haas, Barry Green, and Chip Ganassi. A CART redux seemed too much like a step back. "I was confused," explains Zanardi.

And then he changed his mind and made a deal to drive this season in a Honda-powered Reynard for Mo Nunn Racing. "This is completely different," says Zanardi, now 34. "This is much more, I feel like, almost a family-owned business, in the sense that I know Morris so well."

Nunn, the chief engineer when Zanardi won two CART championships, in 1997 and '98, for Target/Chip Ganassi Racing, says, "Alex is a winner. There's nothing to stop him from doing what he did before, and we're going to give him the equipment to be up front again, get pole positions, win races, and win championships." Nunn says the F1 adventure was "not a true indication" of Zanardi's talents.

When Zanardi left CART, many questioned the wisdom of his decision to go Formula 1 racing with the Williams team. Zanardi had fully expected to repeat the success of Jacques Villeneuve, the '95 CART champion who had graduated to F1 and gone on to win the 1997 world championship for the Williams team.

Although the British-based team run by Frank Williams has been a powerhouse in Formula 1 racing, it was, on Zanardi's arrival, in the midst of a gut-wrenching transition. Zanardi's timing couldn't have been worse. His car broke at virtually every race. And that led to charges, recriminations, and accusations between Zanardi and team members. Driver and team could scarcely wait for the disastrous season's end to part company, voiding the final two years of a three-year contract. An insider believes Zanardi walked away from F1 with $11 million.

Zanardi is no longer the exuberant, flamboyant king of CART, brimming with bravado and self-confidence. His once ramrod-straight posture is slumped. His shoulders sag. Even his dark features seem softened by the blows of two years ago. His passionate, poetically expressive, soulful side seems wounded. He is filled with introspection and even self-doubt. But he has decided it is finally time to exorcise his demons.

"For the first time in my life, it's really my call. I just felt I didn't want to do it last year. I wanted to stay home with my wife and my son -- both of whom I love very much -- and do nothing," Zanardi continues, lounging on his patio. Daniela is in the kitchen, seemingly taking pains to steer clear of this interview. "It is my wish, my desire to come back now. Nobody is forcing me to do it."

The need for speed returned suddenly. "I started to dream about it," but he worried he'd waited too long. He regretted the missed opportunities. It was Nunn who put together an 11th-hour and 59th-minute deal.

"I'm not dreaming now. It's going to be tough in the beginning, because there are some very good teams out there, and we are putting things together just now," he said in late December. "But the great thing is that, yeah, there may be a lot of expectation because of what I did before -- [but] in reality, I don't really care. I'm in the business now to enjoy myself, to mix myself with the others and to be racing again, and as long as I do my best, I will be happy."

That's something he rarely was during his humiliating F1 debacle. "It was a relationship that wasn't born right. I probably needed a rest, because it was a long season for me in the States, you know. A lot of success, but a lot of traveling for three years, and I was very tired. But I started to test for Williams, and to do public-relations work for them, before my season with Ganassi was even over. I never had a break. So I never had the energy to find the anger to do things right -- from the word go.

"That, together with the fact a lot of things were wrong. I was expecting Williams, at least, to be a team where everything was impeccable."

From the start, Zanardi admits, "I was disappointed in the car, I have to say, because the car was not as nice to drive as a Champ car. Yeah, I was disappointed not only in the car, but the grooved tires -- I hate those! -- and the lack of grip. The lack of power, a little bit. So that wasn't a lot of fun."

His former teammate in F1, Ralf Schumacher, who is also Zanardi's neighbor, says, "Perhaps the car was to blame. The FW21 was a difficult car to drive. It was very nervous. Perhaps that caused him problems. It is also difficult to move from CART to Formula 1 because of the differences in the cars. CART machines are much more stable and can be driven very aggressively, as suits his style. Whereas the Formula 1 cars have to be nursed more because of the grooved tires."

So why didn't Schumacher suffer the same car problems? Schumacher says his advantage was the extensive testing he did in the Williams car. He provided the setup for both cars at every race; Zanardi did not. "I really wanted Alex to stay," says Schumacher. "He had no luck. The car was difficult."

Zanardi, however, sees it differently. The F1 car was "boring" to drive, and it could have been "driven by the simulator" by remote control from the team's headquarters in England, he says. Certainly, Zanardi's skills seemed much more attuned to throwing an Indy car around in devil-may-care fashion, bouncing over curbs and off fellow competitors.

Villeneuve, on the other hand, says that driving an F1 car "is tougher than anything a driver has ever imagined. You don't know what you're letting yourself in for. The first time you race in F1, everything just comes at you. Your heartbeat goes up 20 or 30 beats. You're thinking so much about what to do, rather than just getting on with it."

Whatever the case, Zanardi says that a "lot of people around the paddock cannot explain, or cannot believe, that the driver they thought was going to be so successful in Formula 1 -- after what he did over in America -- can all of a sudden become worse than my grandmother to drive a Formula 1 car."

Zanardi says he butted heads early -- and often -- with Williams technical director Patrick Head. He says his feedback to Head about the car was unheeded, deliberately ignored, or ridiculed. Zanardi felt patronized by Head, who claimed to know better than the driver what was going on inside the cockpit. Mutual distrust immediately began to corrode his relationship with team members.

Zanardi's only shining moment in F1 came at the Italian Grand Prix, in which he qualified fourth after finally getting the right amount of practice, tires, and mechanical attention to detail he felt the team owed him. But it all came to naught; he ran as high as second but was forced to slow down because the floor of his car had broken on the first lap. The condition worsened as the race wore on, and he finished seventh.

That nonpoints finish, as well as so many others, reflected poorly on Zanardi because Schumacher, his teammate, was finishing races and scoring points.

"The team actually tried to promote antagonism between its two drivers," Zanardi says. "They think if the two drivers don't like each other, they're going to push each other more because each one wants to beat the other. The attitude that I had about that was probably misinterpreted as a lack of desire. I didn't care about beating my teammate. I just wanted to do good for myself and for the team I was driving for."

But the repeated mechanical failures were damning. Blame, Zanardi admitted, ultimately lands at the driver's feet.

"Yes, my car had very many problems. Yes, my car was not very good, but having said that, my teammate scored 30 points with a car that -- theoretically, from the word go -- was supposed to be the same car. So I've got to face some responsibility for that as well."

At season's end, Frank Williams was diplomatic when asked if Zanardi's driving had a lot to do with the DNFs. "We are very disappointed with Alex's lack of opportunity to race more than he did." Before the season even ended, Williams dumped his engine supplier, Supertec, and began a partnership with BMW. A very raw rookie, Jenson Button, was signed to join Schumacher. Villeneuve suggests this reasoning: "If it looks like they [Williams] are going to have a very bad year, because the new engine [BMW's] is not up to it, then they might as well take someone without experience. In that sense, it's logical." Button was fired after an erratic year, earning only 12 championship points. He moves to Benetton for the 2001 F1 season. Ironically, Button's replacement is Juan Pablo Montoya, who enters F1 as the reigning CART champion, just as Zanardi did two years ago.

Personal responsibility became a major issue for Zanardi that season. His son was also born in late summer, and critics accused him of giving up after that. They said he became more interested in staying alive -- to be a father to his son -- than in being willing to take the extreme chances needed, in a car Zanardi says felt "made out of paper," to make up a couple of positions midpack. To that charge, Zanardi shrugs.

When Zanardi finally walked way from F1 racing, he did not look back. "I could afford the luxury of taking a year's sabbatical," he says, referring to the one saving grace of the experience -- the many zeroes of his F1 paycheck. "I made in one year what it would have taken me 10 years to make in CART."

We asked him if the F1 situation was a bit like a successful television actor who yearns to make the quantum leap to the silver screen -- only to find the movie business a quagmire of traps.

"Yes, that is very possible. What you are saying makes a lot of sense. That is a good example. It explains very well the way I feel," he answers, adding wryly, "I will have to use that the next time I make one of my famous speeches, when I get asked this question.

"It makes sense, because a lot of people believe Formula 1 is the pinnacle. I still felt a world champion when I won the championship over in CART, despite the fact that many drivers would say it didn't mean much. I was very proud, actually."

One thing Zanardi has learned well in his self-taught English is how to be diplomatic. Obviously, much more went wrong between him and Frank Williams than he is willing to talk about. "From my position -- as a failure -- to speak my mind out, it may sound like an excuse, so I'd rather keep my mouth shut," he says.

It is thought that the snooty F1 crowd dismisses CART as the American bush league. The miserable showings of Michael Andretti and Zanardi on the Grand Prix tour are cited as evidence. Why, then, did F1 teams even want to hire them?

One theory -- and Zanardi does not want it credited to him -- "is that to prove you are the best, sometimes you hire the best from other disciplines and put them working with your people -- to let your people prove they are better," he says. But there's no one to refute that theory because, as Zanardi says, "Formula 1 is not a person -- it's an attitude."

But Zanardi wants to put F1 behind him and focus now on recapturing the magic he developed during his three years in CART. Will he change his approach at all?

"No, I wouldn't change anything," Zanardi says. "But I know a lot will change because this is a completely different adventure, and I'm not trying to build something on top of the ashes of what was there before. The experience that I had with Chip, with Jimmy [Vasser], with Honda, with Target and Reynard, or whatever, it's stuck in my heart. It's beautiful memories, and they will always be there, whether I do super-well next year, or whether I do super-bad. But I'll do my best to build some new good memories. It's going to be totally different, but I can't say now what I am going to enjoy and what I am going to regret. But it's fun to find out."

Should we expect Zanardi to tone down his wildest on-track antics?

"What I want to say is that all I did in the past was not part of a plan," says Zanardi, who admits to living only in the moment. "If somebody said, 'Well, I like that guy Zanardi,' it's just because I'm really crazy and that's my way of exploding when I achieve something that I consider fantastic. And if I spin the car around, and people name that 'doughnut' and are starting to ask me to do it again -- that was not part of a plan, that was simply me, being very, very happy and wanting to celebrate somehow."

Although fans call him Mr. Doughnut for his tire-smoking victory celebrations, Nunn calls him the "Pineapple" -- Nunn's pejorative for a troublemaker. It's good-natured ribbing, however. Zanardi boasts that he's always given his engineers a hard time, and he sports a self-drawn pineapple on his helmet to cheekily acknowledge that.

One expects that, in Nunn, Zanardi sees something of his father, Diro, who died at only 54 in 1997 before Zanardi won his first championship. His father, whom Alex loved dearly, was his crew chief in his karting days, "my No. 1 fan and my No. 1 critic. Even when I would win, and be very happy for myself," Zanardi remembers, "he would give very critical comments and tell me, 'You are an idiot,' and call me bad words." Alex says he desperately sought his father's approval while growing up, and seldom got it. One wonders how Zanardi's life path and career choices might have been different the past four years had his father not died when he did.

"I probably would be a plumber, like my father, if I had not been successful enough in racing," laughs Zanardi, an exceptional student who earned a civil engineering degree in Bologna, where he also learned fluent French -- all the while racing go-karts on the weekends.

Zanardi admits his father was not a supporter of his original decision to go CART racing. But Zanardi ignored his father's wishes to take advantage of Ganassi's offer to salvage his career after his first (and also unsatisfactory) stint in F1. Zanardi's earlier F1 career began in 1991 as a "supersub," first as a replacement for Michael Schumacher on the Jordan team, then in '92 when he subbed for an injured Christian Fittipaldi at Minardi. In '93, he signed on with Lotus during its dying breaths and was injured when the car fell apart on him at the Spa race. He returned briefly in '94, taking over at Lotus again when Pedro Lamy was injured. In '95, he campaigned a Lotus Esprit in the BPR series before going to CART.

Would Alex's father have approved of the Formula 1 gambit with Williams? What would he say about Alex's decision to return now to CART? Or would his father have wanted him to instead return to F1, in hopes of vindicating himself. Rather surprisingly, Zanardi still won't rule out a return to racing's "silver screen."

"You can't ever say never," Zanardi answers. "It's logical to say that in this life I don't think I will do Formula 1 again -- although there's still opportunities for me out there, even now." But Zanardi prefers being a contender in CART to being a pretender in F1.

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